Making Nice by Ferdinand Mount

 

Making Nice by Ferdinand Mount.

Published 30th September 2021 by Bloomsbury.

From the cover of the book:

Ferdinand Mount's stinging satire plunges into the dubious world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and the campaign trail in Africa and America. 

We follow the hapless Dickie Pentecost, redundant diplomatic correspondent for a foundering national newspaper, together with his stern oncologist wife Jane, and their daughters Flo, an aspiring ballerina, and the quizzical teenager Lucy. 

The whole family find themselves entangled in an ever more alarming series of events revolving around the elusive Ethel (full name Ethelbert), dynamic founder of the soaring public relations agency Making Nice.

With echoes of Evelyn Waugh and The Thick of It, Making Nice is a masterly take on the madness of contemporary society and the limitless human capacity for self-deception.

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Dickie Pentecost is a man at loss with the modern world, despite having been a diplomatic correspondent for a national newspaper for a number of years. Now surplus to requirements in a age when news has become all about clicks on a website, Dickie is forced to try to find a job that fits his skillset in the modern world of work, and has no clue what to do next.

When Dickie's oncologist wife Jane decides to take a career break to take care of their youngest daughter Lucy, who has developed epilepsy, he is forced to find a job to support his family rather more quickly than he is comfortable with. As a result, he gets drawn into the surreal world of PR through the curiously named Making Nice agency, run by the mysterious Ethel - a man who seems to inveigled himself into their lives after a family camping trip. 

Ethel is a hard man to pin down, but somehow the sheer force of his personality gets Dickie into some very sticky situations behind the scenes of political campaigns in Africa and America, and then disastrously thrusts him into the civil service machine that runs Westminster. Dickie is out of his depth from the start and always one step behind Ethel and his Machiavellian schemes - which unfortunately include Dickie's sixteen-year-old daughter Flo too. Will Dickie get wise before it is too late?

Political satire is a curious beast, and in this age where just about anything and everything has been attempted by the characters inhabiting the political sphere at home and abroad in recent years, it's not easy to find something truly absurd to write about that doesn't come from reality. For this reason, I think this book has rather a difficult job to live up to, but Ferdinand Mount gives it a good go.

The political satire elements of this book are cleverly contrived, with authentic echoes underlying the threads of corrupt African political candidates, Trump-esque American White House hopefuls and bumbling Downing Street clowns that drive the more biting farcical goings on that Dickie finds himself embroiled in. Much of this is too close to the mark to be funny, but there is still plenty of dark humour to be derived from the way in which the most ridiculous scenarios can be spun by horrifically creative PR gurus - and some important lessons to be learned about how and why PR exists. If the concept of data mining is not something you have ever really thought about before either, then this will definitely open your eyes to quite how much of your private life can be extrapolated from the details you share on social media - scary indeed. As a vehicle to expose quite how much you can fool almost all the people, almost all of the time, this is a book that does its job well - and the years that Mount spent behind the scenes himself at Downing Street really shine through in the detail.

It is the idea that this book explores self-deception that does not fly, I think. The Pentecost family are intended as the butt of all Ethel's devious schemes in these pages, and some pretty uncomfortable plotlines result before Dickie finally reaches a long-overdue epiphany. The problem for me is that as a family they are just not relatable, or even likeable - except perhaps for Lucy. Dickie is just too naive, and he and Jane are both completely disconnected from each other and their children. I am unwilling to reveal spoilers here, but the Ethel-Flo storyline in particular is a step too far for me, and served to make me dislike the family more, rather than feel any sympathy for them - would Dickie and Jane really stand on the sidelines rather than upset the rosy-hued happiness of a sixteen-year-old? I think not. Not much humour to be derived here methinks.

All in all, this makes the book a bit of a curate's egg, with the parts clearly drawn from Mount's personal experience flowing nicely and bursting with satirical delights, and the foray into more domestic dramas leaving you with an unfortunate bad taste in the mouth - less would have been a lot more on this front. The balance is a little bit off to make this a book to shower with lyrical praise, which is a bit of a shame, because it is engaging and very well written. However, If you are a die hard fan of wickedly biting series like The Thick of It then you will find a lot in this book to draw a wry smile or two, especially if you don't really mind your characters being on the unlikeable side.

Making It is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Bloomsbury for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Tandem Collective for inviting me to be part of the Instagram Readalong for this book.

About the author:

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and two grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'.